King Roger, Royal Opera, 1 May 2015



Images: ROH/Bill Cooper

Royal Opera House

Archbishop – Alan Ewing

Deaconess – Agnes Zwierko
King Roger – Mariusz Kwiecień
Edrisi – Kim Begley
Roxana – Georgia Jarman
Shepherd – Saimir Pirgu

Kasper Holten (director)

Steffen Aarfing (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Luke Halls (video)
Cathy Marston (choreography)
John Lloyd Davies (dramaturgy)
 
Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)


At last, Szymanowski’s masterpiece, King Roger, has reached Covent Garden. With one, sadly predictable, exception, it receives excellent treatment too. What a joy it is to see staged here a work, which, like Janáček’s bizarrely ignored operas, is no longer than it need be, and so handsomely repays attention in every minute of its mere ninety. (Incidentally, placing an interval after the second act was surely a mistake; this is a work considerably shorter than Salome or Elektra, and nothing was gained by having to step outside for half an hour.)

 

Kasper Holten’s production is relatively straightforward, but none the worse for that. Save for gentle costume updating to the time of composition, it is difficult to imagine self-styled ‘traditionalists’ having anything much to worry about. A gigantic King Roger’s head, in different states, inhabits the centre of the stage. Are we to understand that the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus is entirely within his head? Probably not; surely there remains some important element of the social. However, a reminder that this is, amongst other things, his conflict is no bad thing. Oppressive, patriarchal Orthodoxy surrounds the realm of the personal in the first act.

 

In the second, the head turns around so as to reveal, if  not strictly speaking, the inner palace courtyard of the libretto, then something pretty close: royal quarters, in which books – is that, ultimately, whence these dangerous ideas come? Nietzsche, perhaps? – are prominent. In the basement are writhing bodies, refugees from Tannhäuser’s Venusberg – which, in terms of the work, musically as well as conceptually, is very much what they should be. Cathy Marston’s choreography did little for me, I am afraid, but having recently endured again the absurdly excessive dance of Sasha Waltz’s Tannhäuser, there was relief for me to be had in lesser intrusion.

The third act, rightly, presents ruins, both social and personal. The head has been destroyed under whatever new dispensation it is the Dionysian Shepherd offers. Not for the first time, I thought of Henze’s The Bassarids in Christof Loy’s Munich production. The dangers of this brave new world are clear, for, not only have the erstwhile faithful blindly followed their new master, they blithely throw a few surviving books upon the pyre. To destroy culture is cheap, as inconoclasts from Alexandria to Rupert Murdoch to ISIS have known all too well; the cost is crippling. Mere hedonism is not the way forward; the blinding light at the end – here as simple and as striking as in Mariusz Treliński’s production, which I saw in Edinburgh in 2008 – shows that another path for Roger, and for us, will not be easy; it may not even be right. We need, however, to try. If, sadly, as in Treliński’s staging, Szymanowski’s overt homoeroticism is played down, then there are other ideas well worth pondering: not hammered home, for such tends not to be Holten’s way of operating, but more open-ended, which seems quite apt for the work and, in particular, for its unresolved, perhaps irresolvable, conclusion. After all, the final C major chord is no more convincing as affirmation than that in Elektra; the Shepherd’s strains remain.

Antonio Pappano’s conducting proved somewhat disappointing, although he certainly seemed aware of the difficulties of balance within the orchestra and for the most part steered a judicious enough path in that respect. However, if not so bedevilled by stopping and starting as his Wagner, Pappano’s account nevertheless seemed incapable for the most part of rising above the indifference of mezzo piano, to misquote Pierre Monteux. The orchestra here is defiantly post-Wagnerian, at least as much a character as anything we see on stage; here, despite some truly excellent playing, Pappano reduced it to mere accompaniment. There was too much of a tendency to meander, too: a hostage to fortune to those who would claim Szymanowski’s world amorphous. It is not, but it requires a more comprehending conductor to present to full advantage its golden tapestry in motion.

 

Choral singing, however, was excellent, from, to quote Stephen Downes’s excellent programme note, that ‘majestic, awe-inspiring chorus’ onwards. Indeed, in that’ Byzantine Sanctus sung in harmonies that evoke archaic primitivism and power,’ the basses – a sizable extra chorus had been enlisted – offered a highly convincing impression of their Eastern European confrères. Weight and sensitive diction were, throughout, shown to be anything but opposing tendencies. Renato Balsadonna and his singers deserve great credit, not least for discretely posing the question of to what extent we might consider this work a staged oratorio. It is a tendency rather than an identity, but a worthwhile tendency to raise, especially given the subject matter.

The cast was excellent too. At its heart stood Mariusz Kwiecień’s Roger. Although an ailing Kwiecień sounded – if only relatively – a little tired at the end of the second and third acts, that in no way detracted from the thoughtful heroism of his portrayal. It is a role with which, of course, he has a lengthy association; indeed, on this occasion, it seemed made for him, so close were his identification and projection of the King’s conflicting voices. This was certainly not a Roger, even when unwell, who stood in need of Pappano’s quenching the fires of Szymanowski’s orchestra. The rest of the cast seemed no more in need of that. Saimir Pirgu offered an alluring, properly dangerous, ultimately yet prematurely triumphant Shepherd, whom many would have followed. The alterity of his Lydian-inflected music, deliberately non-developmental, ‘an enclosed, complete and self-referential musical system’ (Downes), made its dramatic point strongly, even without the overwhelming orchestral contribution that might have been present. Georgia Jarman’s Roxana certainly seemed clear why she was doing so, yet not without affection for her consort; one sensed that she would like to have included him. Her second-act aria was as ravishingly sensual as anyone might decently – or indecently – have hoped. Alan Ewing, Agnes Zwierko, and Kim Begley all distinguished themselves in the smaller roles. Old Szymanowski hands and newcomers alike should hasten to the Royal Opera House.

 

The Passenger, English National Opera, 24 September 2011

Coliseum

Annaliese Franz – Michelle Breedt
Marta – Giselle Allen
Walter – Kim Begley
Tadeusz – Leigh Melrose
Katya – Julia Sporsén
Krystina – Pamela Helen Stephen
Vlasta – Wendy Dawn Thompson
Hannah – Carolyn Dobbin
Yvette – Rhian Lois
Old Woman – Helen Field
Bronka – Rebecca de Pont Davies
SS Officers – Adrian Dwyer, Charles Johnston, Gerard O’Connor
Steward/Elderly Passenger/Kommandant – Graeme Dandy
SS Officer/Kapo – Vanessa Leagh-Hicks

David Pountney (director)
Rob Kearley (associate director)
Johan Engels (set designs)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Fabrice Kebour (lighting)
Ran Arthur Braun (director)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Sir Richard Armstrong (conductor)

This is not to be taken in any real sense as a review but rather just as a few observations. ENO’s season, as so often, is a far more interesting prospect than that of its big brother across Covent Garden (three – or four, depending on how one counts – runs for La traviata!) Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, receives its British premiere, in a staging by David Pountney first seen at Bregenz. It is in excellent company, alongside works by Wolfgang Rihm, Detlev Glanert, and ENO’s first ever staging of a Rameau opera, Castor et Pollux (to be reviewed next month).

The problem, I am afraid, is that, on the basis of what I heard, Weinberg’s music is catastrophically inept. It is not merely that it adds nothing to the story; its aimlessness and weirdly arbitrary inappropriateness detract from what ought to be a harrowing tale of Holocaust remembrance. The Passenger is not offensive in the way that Terry Gilliam’s narcissistic Damnation of Faust was – an ignorant anti-German rant that also managed to posit genocide as entertainment – for it is clearly meant well, but the best, or at least most arresting, of Weinberg’s music seems to be heard in the couple of minutes or so before the voices enter, and it is still not very good. Some loud kettledrums at least have an effect. Whatever is one to make of the xylophone runs interpolated later on, though? It is difficult to imagine either musical or dramatic motivation for them: they just come and go. Influences or at least strong likenesses come thick and thin: perhaps most oddly, Shostakovich in jazz mode whilst Annaliese informs her diplomat husband of her wartime activities in the SS. Weill this is not, though it seems pretty clear that there is influence there. Most glaring is a passage – we are on a ship, so I suppose it is deliberate – that sounds lifted straight from Peter Grimes. Hindemith and Busoni might also be present, though the likeness may be coincidental rather than anything else. Otherwise, voices declaim, sometimes break into aria-like writing, whilst thin, irrelevant instrumental lines fill in the space below. Male SS officers veer dangerously close to the unintentionally comic: this does not appear to be an ironic commentary upon their repellent desire to burn human bodies more quickly, merely a product of the composer’s inability to compose appropriate music. A female officer unfortunately reminds one, both in appearance and delivery, of Helga from ‘Allo ‘Allo! What might work in depiction of Occupied France is not, to put it mildly, necessarily the best thing for an extermination camp.

Pountney’s production seems as good as the work is likely to get – and better than it deserves. There would have been a far greater sense of claustrophobia and naked terror, had they not been undermined by the music. Designs (Johan Engels’s sets and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes) and lighting (Fabrice Kebour) do everything one might have asked of them. Sir Richard Armstrong’s conducting is incisive, the ENO orchestra on excellent, truly responsive form, generating a volume that surprises in the vast expanses of the Coliseum. The singers again make the strongest possible case, Michelle Breedt’s Annaliese properly conflicted and vibrant, insofar as the music will permit that, Kim Begley’s delivery as heedful of text as one would expect, and so on. However, as I said, this is not really a review. For one thing, I left at the interval, unable to drag myself back into the theatre. Perhaps the second act would have proved a revelation. Perhaps not.

Das Rheingold, Opéra national de Paris, 25 March 2010

Images: Opéra national de Paris/Charles Duprat

Wotan – Falk Struckmann
Donner – Samuel Youn
Froh – Marcel Reijans
Loge – Kim Begley
Alberich – Peter Sidhom
Mime – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Fasolt – Iain Paterson
Fafner – Günther Groissböck
Fricka – Sophie Koch
Freia - Ann Petersen
Erda – Qiu Lin Zhang
Woglinde – Caroline Stein
Wellgunde – Daniela Sindram
Flosshilde – Nicole Piccolomini

Günter Krämer (director)
Jürgen Bäckmann (designs)
Falk Bauer (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

The beginning of a new Ring will always be an event but is perhaps even more so in Paris. The Paris Opéra itself has not presented a complete cycle since 1957, reaching only as far as Die Walküre under Solti in 1976 – and even then, the company was still exclusively ensconced at the Palais Garnier, as opposed to its present day split between the old theatre and François Mitterand’s Opéra Bastille. There have been more recent performances of the tetralogy, however, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the Châtelet. The city so important to understanding Wagner, the city for which he notoriously prescribed a ‘fire cure’ and which punished him more than handsomely with the Tannhäuser debacle, has never been short of Wagnerians and has equally never been short of opponents. There is, of course, nothing more Parisian than an artistic ‘controversy’ (consider the Querelle des bouffons) or ‘case’: was Nietzsche more décadent than he knew? Perhaps surprisingly, that arch-controversialist Gérard Mortier never, during his reign at the Bastille rose to this ultimate challenge pour épater les bourgeois, but the new directorate of Nicolas Jöel and Philippe Jordan, the latter already a Wagner conductor of considerable experience, has. Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are presented this season; Siegfried and Götterdämmerung are scheduled for next.


I had felt somewhat nonplussed by earlier work I had seen from director Günter Krämer. At the 2002 Salzburg Festival, I was grateful enough for the chance to hear Strauss’s ‘cheerful mythology’, Die Liebe der Danae, still more so from the Staatskapelle Dresden and Fabio Luisi, but the production seemed to do little other than to present each act at a different stage of the work’s history: the 1944 dress rehearsal, the ‘true’ premiere of 1952, and the revival fifty years hence. Tristan, which I saw in Vienna in 2008, I found still less revealing: unobjectionable, but nothing more. By contrast, this Rheingold is really rather good: red in tooth and claw, as befits the least ambiguously socialist of all Wagner’s stage works. The staging is recognisably post-Chéreau – what could it mean to attempt to be pre-Chéreau? – and certainly shares ideas with other productions, but I see no harm in that. It generally works as a synthesis, and some of the greatest artists and thinkers have had abilities at least as much synthetic as ‘original’: for instance, Marx, who looms large here. (The programme misleads in straightforwardly describing Wagner (p.86) as ‘lecteur de Marx’. He may well have been; indeed, I should wager that he was. However, short of new documentary evidence coming to light, we cannot say for certain.) And Wagner as a thinker was certainly synthetic in tendency, if not always in achievement, nowhere more interesting than in the contradictions this might present.

Though we have seen the Rhinemaidens as ladies of the night before, the direction on stage makes this credible theatrically as well as a good idea. (I am trying not to shudder excessively at memories of the embarrassing pole-dancing experiment from Phyllida Lloyd for the English National Opera.) Alberich is a dwarf too, for those who treasure stage directions – and he certainly should be a misfit in a trivial world where one is judged solely on appearances. Krämer recognises that there is no golden age for Wagner: the composer, often even in this work a Schopenhauerian avant la lettre, presents an almost Hobbesian initial state of nature and a Fall that is anything but a felix culpa. That the post-lapsarian world is still worse than its predecessor does not detract from the latter’s amorality. Diego Leetz’s lighting works well in suggesting a Rhine of sorts. This first scene, then, seems to me a model of what Warren Darcy has called a ‘tragedy in miniature’.

I was disappointed at the abruptness of the scene shift that followed: at odds with one of the supreme examples of Wagner’s ‘most delicate and profound’ art of transition, that of Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla. We see the site for the latter, though not of course the completed version, too early. What is being built is, with perhaps unduly heavy-handed reference to the Third Reich, GERMANIA, whose capital – in more than one sense – construction, grandiose as the drama’s conclusion, we witness as the evening progresses. Portrayal of the gods is imaginative. Their idealistic physique – muscles for the men, breasts for the women – is clearly constructed, in that they wear these, and one is intended to see that they are not ‘natural’. This certainly fits with Feuerbach’s conception, so important to Wagner, of religion alienating human qualities onto a projected godhead and thereby impoverishing life on earth. The appendages are lost when Freia and her golden apples are captured, and put back on upon her return to the fold. It is not quite clear to me, however, why Wotan does not suffer this fate. Loge, as so often, steals the show. Initially more than a little camp, the outsider, brilliantly portrayed by Kim Begley, soon throws caution to the wind as a fully-fledged drag artiste.

Nibelheim comes across well, especially its centrepiece golden globe hoard and the equally striking pendulum-like cutting mechanism that swings throughout. The wonder and tawdriness of the magic trick are presented in Alberich’s Tarnhelm transformations: we know that he is hiding behind the ball; yet we see and hear that others believe something else. Moreover, we witness the brute power wielded over the Nibelungs, since these are cowering characters on stage. Wotan’s wresting of the ring from the dwarf, one of the truly terrible moments in the cycle, most certainly is here: the violent, bloody loss of the finger realistic and prescient as Alberich’s curse itself. Then there are the giants. Initially they appear with socialist propaganda followed – this a coup de théâtre – by a threatening band of angry proletarians, who burst into the audience, dispensing red sheets, inscribed with Fasolt’s fundamental denunciation of Wotan: ‘Was du bist, bist du nur durch Verträge.’ (‘What you are, you are through contracts alone.) Not a bad agitprop slogan, and in a nice touch, Fricka peruses what seems to be a fuller prospectus of the workers’ programme. The subsequent portrayal of Fafner chills. A construction union boss, we see in the fourth scene that he is more inhuman than the gods, savagely wielding and employing his whip when duly strengthened by possession of the ring. (I could not help but think of the leaders of UNITE, drawing salaries not so very far off the executives they excoriate.) Also memorable, with attendant change of pace, is Erda’s scene, in which, clad as a Victorian matriarch, she slowly traverses the stage as she delivers her warning: simple but effective. She watches beforehand, which perhaps serves no particular purpose but, by the same token, does no especial harm.

Begley was perhaps the star performer, sardonic and with a perfect sense of timing, but the cast in general impressed. Peter Sidhom does not possess the largest of voices for Alberich, but he cleverly used what he has. Iain Paterson and Günther Groissböck clearly differentiated between Fafner and Fasolt, the vocal and scenic realisation properly increasing as the drama progressed. Qiu Lin Zhang suffered from bad intonation at her entry as Erda, but recovered with nobility. Falk Struckmann was variable as Wotan, always attentive to the words but sometimes a little underwhelming vocally, apparently pushing him to be a bit too much of an ‘actor’ on stage. Sophie Koch had something of the sphinx’s enigmatic quality to the god’s attractively sung and played consort: more interesting than something too overtly shrew-like. Marcel Reijans displayed an attractive lyric tenor as Froh. The Rhinemaidens were of somewhat uneven quality, at least in vocal terms.

Underpinning this all, however, was the first-rate orchestral contribution. The orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris sounded surprisingly – welcomely – ‘German’ in tone, doubtless in partial consequence of Philippe Jordan’s experience in German houses, not least the Berlin Staatsoper. The blend was impressive, sometimes reminiscent of Karajan’s favoured Wagner sound. This rendered the novelty – in historical terms – of Wagner’s brass writing telling, but subtly so. The only real disappointment was the feebleness of the anvils. For Jordan’s command of the work’s vast structure one could certainly forgive that. He certainly has the measure of the work’s ebb and flow, of the orchestra’s role as Greek chorus; I have heard him do nothing finer. Indeed, all told, this was the best Rheingold I have attended since Haitink’s tenure at the Royal Opera. Die Walküre is eagerly anticipated.